Portrait of a Cafeteria Lady (Interview with Wanda Adams)
Some cafeteria ladies became famous within their small circles, and some of their recipes have appeared in community cookbooks over the years. One of these was Mrs. Eleanor Kim Tyau, a Korean American who was born in 1915 in Kona on the island of Hawai‘i, moved to O‘ahu as a child, and married a Chinese man at age nineteen. Tyau first came to Wanda Adams’s attention through a request from Shirley Okino, whose husband craved the salad dress- ing known to Saint Louis School boys of a certain generation simply as “Mrs. Tyau’s Sauce.” When the food page put out a call for the recipe, versions came in from all over. It was a straightforward salad dressing of the sort popular in the early twentieth century under the title “French Dressing,” tomato and oil based. But there was something about the way she made it that had the boys drizzling it on everything, from rice to cooked vegetables, bread to broiled meats. Here is her story, based on an interview conducted by Wanda Adams when Tyau was in her nineties.
Eleanor Kim Tyau first worked as a maid and cook (“not by choice; it was what I could do”). A Mrs. Edwards from the Department of Education was impressed with her work and urged her to go the University of Hawai‘i to get a degree in food services management. “She said you can train anybody to be a cafete- ria manager, but you need a degree to be a food services manager,” Mrs. Tyau
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recalled. However, Mrs. Tyau became pregnant and so could not become a full- time student. Instead, when she was twenty-one, she attended a two-year caf- eteria manager program taught at the central Honolulu high school (McKinley High School) taught by a Mrs. Foxall.
Upon graduation, Mrs. Tyau’s first assignment was at Kalihi-waena School, where she remained until World War II. As everyone was expected to turn their hand to war work, she was assigned to the cafeteria on the campus of Saint Louis School (a Catholic Marianist school for young men), which had been turned into a civilian defense canteen, a feeding station for war workers (students took their classes and meals at McKinley High School during this period).
This would be the beginning of a fruitful thirty-seven-year career at Saint Louis School; when the war ended, the school asked her to stay on as a con- cessionaire. An independent businesswoman, she was contracted not only to provide meals for students but also three meals a day for the boarders and the priests and brothers who taught there, and lunch for nonboarding students. A sports lover, Mrs. Tyau also found time to cook for the various sports teams and to provide meals for class reunions. She remained touchingly grateful that coaches and athletes were kind to her developmentally disabled son; in return, she fed them well and helped raise funds for the teams.
At one point, she supervised a staff of twenty to accomplish this. For the much-loved Saint Louis Carnival fund-raiser, she made gallons of
kimchi (hot and sour fermented cabbage) and taigu (dried salt cod marinated in sesame oil, paprika, Korean red pepper powder, and honey and dressed with sesame seeds). “I used to buy the codfish in hundred-pound crates and soak it and pick out all the bones myself,” she recalled, shaking her head at the work she was capable of then. She made hundreds and hundreds of jars of each dish annually for the sale, carrying on from the late 1940s until her retirement in the 1970s. “But I just never seemed to make enough of it.”
Despite her fame for kimchi and taigu, Mrs. Tyau said she doesn’t recall cooking much that “I could truly say was Korean or Japanese; it was more West- ern stuff—stew, curry, meatloaf, baked chicken, spaghetti.” However, she did acknowledge that Asian ingredients played a role in many of these Western reci- pes and that both teriyaki chicken and teriyaki beef were standards.
Her specialties included sweet-sour spareribs, beef stew, lamb curry (she bought whole carcasses and cut all the meat), baked spaghetti (with bacon in the sauce and cheese on top) and an invention of her own called “Spanish beans,” which was cubed luncheon meat and fresh green beans, stewed in tomato purée with onions, garlic, and soy sauce, and thickened with a poi (mashed and fermented taro root)-based batter. (“I didn’t like flour or cornstarch”; see appendix.) Desserts
Christine R. Yano (with Wanda Adams)
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ran to chocolate sundae pie (Spanish cream with bitter chocolate curls), peach and apricot pie, marble cakes (yellow cake with chunks of chocolate and chocolate frosting). “It was all very simple food, but the boys liked it,” she confessed.